August 08, 2013

The (feather) harvest is heavy, but laborers are few

Sometimes people use the word "harvest" as if it was a once a year thing. I suppose that may be true of monocultures, but at Goat Rope Farm, harvests of one type or another go on throughout a good chunk of the year.

Thanks to a cold frame engineered by the Spousal Unit, we've harvested lettuce and spinach for a good chunk of late winter and early spring. Garlic is midsummer. Now we have a scary invasion of summer squash.

But the agricultural product of the moment is....peacock feathers.

Our guy, Woodstock, is shedding them at this time, leaving them all over the vicinity. It is one of my tasks to go on walkabouts to retrieve as many as possible. Their eventual destination is the classroom, where said Spousal Unit gives them out as favors. Most popular, of course, are the ones with eyes. The more drab ones, however, make excellent cat toys. Such is life on the cutting edge of post-modern farming.

JUST ONE LINK, BUT IT'S A GOOD ONE. Here's an exciting article about how WV's new Feed to Achieve is being implemented. The long term goal is to ensure that all WV school children enjoy at least two free meals per day (and, we hope, more), but already progress is being made. This article is about innovative ways of offering school breakfasts that should increase participation.

And let me just say that the WV Office of Child Nutrition, which operates under the WV Department of Education, rocks. They are doing a wonderful job every day of trying to ensure and improve access to good food for all the children of this state and they have a passion for it.